PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

Liszt composed his Grand Solo de concert for a competition at the Paris Conservatoire –
the manuscript is dated 1850, although most commentators allow that work probably began
on the piece in the previous year. As is well known, Liszt altered the work before
publication (as Grosses Konzertsolo – see Volume 3), introducing an internal slow
movement, adding two other passages, and making numerous other smaller changes. But
there is a tightness in the construction of the original work which makes the earlier version
in many ways a more satisfying piece, and the section which Liszt was to remove to make
way for the added Andante is of rare beauty. (The first version which he prepared for piano
and orchestra follows the original form; the second, made in collaboration with Eduard
Reuss, follows and extends the two-piano version: Concerto pathétique.) The funeral
march towards the end of the piece is laid out on four staves, and it is clear that Liszt
wishes the upper chords to be sustained whilst the lower drum-roll imitations are to be kept
relatively clean. Of course this is easily possible using the sostenuto pedal of the modern
concert grand, but in 1850 Liszt can at best have had pianos with divided sustaining
pedals – such as Beethoven had had before him.
It has been remarked elsewhere in the notes to this series how Liszt kept returning to his
song Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth, whose original text reflects the joy of Liszt’s very rare
experience of holidaying on the Rhine and staying in the cloisters on the island of
Nonnenwerth, en famille with Marie d’Agoult and their children in the early 1840s. Here is
offered the most elusive of the many versions for solo piano, the first version, which Liszt
gave the rather bulky title Élégie pour piano seul – which he later adopted as a subtitle,
retaining as title that of the song. (For the second version see Volume 36 [where a further
ossia version is also included]; for the third – called Feuille d’Album No 2 – see Volume
26; for the final version see Volume 25.) This version was published in 1843, and may date
from soon after the completion of the original song in 1841 at the latest.
The Romance oubliée also derives from a song – Ô pourquoi donc? – composed in 1843
and transcribed for piano as Romance (see Volume 25) in 1848. The 1880 revision, which
amounts to a completely new view of old material overlaid with a mystical despair
common in the extraordinary music of Liszt’s final years (see Volume 11, and Volume 25
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